Monstrosity
by justrumbelledearie
Summary: When she touches him, his flesh changes from mottled gold to a rosy, human pink. It is the most exquisite alchemy.


Jealousy is an ugly emotion.

It crawls in through the eye sockets and inches its way down the throat, eventually taking up residence within the victim's rib cage. There it crouches, heavy upon the diaphragm, sinking its pincers deep into the tender meat of the heart and lungs, making each breath a cramped and painful battle. Regrettably, there is no ready cure. Once the green-eyed goblin has lodged itself firmly in place, only the beloved's gracious hand can remove it.

Aye, jealousy is an ugly emotion, and Rumplestiltskin is an ugly man.

He is an extraordinarily ugly man with a sharp, pinched nose that is crooked as a bent nail and hideous, glittering skin the unwholesome color of wet sand. His crooked teeth are a ghastly graveyard of decay, and his too-large eyes soak up all the light from any room he enters. Furthermore, he has fearsome, ugly, pitch-dark moods that make him even uglier still.

Take right now, for instance.

He is scowling at his empty basket of straw as if it were the solitary source of all his worldly troubles.

His sour expression pulls his thin shoulders forward and etches deep, unlit caverns into his mottled cheeks and forehead, giving him all the charm of a glowering, rough-hewn gargoyle.

If you really must know, Rumplestiltskin is hunched and scowling because _she_ is blithely unaware of his unblinking golden eyes upon her back and of his pressing, unmet need for yet more straw and of his furtive desire for quiet conversation after a silent dinner. She is lying contentedly belly-down by the fireside, her prim little satin shoes kicked off and pushed beneath the nearest settee, oblivious to everything but her half-drunk mug of cider and the moldering book that is spread open upon the rug in front of her.

It seems his fetching little maid has gone off-duty.

More irksome still, when the pert girl sat down beside him earlier this evening at the supper table, bumping knees and handing over a fresh-pressed napkin and nattering away about the loveliness of the changing seasons and some dusty, tedious book she had found in the Dark Castle's library, he (with his head still pounding from a botched attempt at transmorgrification in the tower) had leaned over until the tips of their noses were quite nearly touching, furrowed his brow most fearsomely, and firmly told her "Shoo!"–and she had _listened!_

The girl who _never_ listens!

Not to his direct, barked orders, in any case. (Rumplestiltskin suspects that she actually attends very closely to the strange comings and goings of his castle–the odd company he keeps, the spells he sometimes whispers, the strange stirrings in his moat, and the curious contents of his unlocked drawers.)

But tonight–she had _listened!_

Forever-underfoot, convivial little Belle had drawn in a quick breath, quietly apologized, then picked up her plate with great dignity and proceeded to eat her supper by the blood-orange light of the hearth, more than halfway across the Great Hall–far, far away from the master of the castle and his thorny, ill-kept temper.

And now her empty plate lies discarded beside her, the sauce from the meat congealing in glistening, brown arabesques and the crumbs from the bread likely to tempt the castle mice if she manages to keep still for long enough. Her chin is propped up by the heel of her hand, and her brown hair spills forward, brushing over the pages of her book.

Whatever it is she is reading, she is completely and utterly captivated. From time to time, she even goes so far as to bend forward a few inches and presses her nose to the slender crease where the pages are bound together with fine linen thread, closing her eyes and happily inhaling. Whenever she does this, Rumplestiltskin's scowl deepens, and he suffers a ruthless pinching and twisting within his chest, just beneath the knobbiest part of his ancient breastbone. When Belle brushes her fingertips lightly across the yellowed pages and smiles her contented, faraway smile, his lungs catch fire, and he cannot manage to swallow or breathe for the burning. When her pink tongue darts out to absently touch her index finger, and she uses the wet fingertip to turn another page, he cannot help but gnash his beastly, ruined teeth.

The bald and ugly truth of it is: Rumplestiltskin is jealous of a book.

"Don't lurk," she softly scolds, without turning around to look at him.

To his great dismay, he finds that his traitorous legs have stood him up and walked him away from the wooden spinning wheel, over to the warm circle of firelight unawares. He is standing a little ways off from the settee, grimacing and–yes, it is impossible to deny it–lurking.

Feeling addled, he elects to regain the upper hand by saying something clever and churlish about his empty basket of straw and his defective, layabout maid, but the words come out somewhat differently than he expected: "What is it you're reading?"

This, of course, wins him her full and immediate attention.

The thimble-sized girl with the red-apple cheeks and the ocean blue eyes rolls over onto her back, props herself up on bent elbows, and tells him, "Oh, it's the most _fascinating_ history, Rumple–written by one of the prior inhabitants of this very castle! His name was 'Erebus the Second,' and it seems he was an extremely powerful magician. He kept a hand-written travelogue and collected peasant stories from the Enchanted Forest for hundreds and hundreds of years!"

Indeed, he has seen and studied this particular book and knows these strange peasant stories, but Rumplestiltskin simply answers her, "Ah."

Belle continues, "Apparently, this magician fellow was born in the village just beyond the pine ridge, and the first stories he wrote down came from there–oh! I'm so sorry I forgot to ask you! Has your headache already gone away? You look a little less ill."

He cuts eyes at her, perplexed. "How did you know my head hurt?"

She shrugs carelessly, her face aglow with affection and some tender, private amusement. "I have two eyes to see with and two functional ears attached to the sides of my head, thank you. When you come crashing down the tower steps like a minotaur, rubbing your neck and spoiling for a fight–well, it's plain to see you're not in a good way."

"And so you wisely scurry off…"

"I _never_ scurry," she firmly corrects him. Then, in a much gentler tone, "And I certainly never take it personally, Rumple. Some days it seems you wear the weight of the world on your shoulders."

She smiles and stretches out a hand to him, fixing him with such a steady, candid gaze that his very heart seems to clang and then shudder to a stop within his chest. The moment hangs suspended between them, too viscous to easily release either one of them from their sweetly implausible tableau: a beautiful girl, a bewildered old minotaur, a forgotten book, and a fire that pops and hisses and crackles and gently licks at the cool night air within the Great Hall.

"Come sit beside me," Belle says at last, breaking the spell, "I'll rub your neck if you'll let me tell you more about Erebus the historian."

Now, this is perhaps the very least likely offer he ever expected to receive from a high-born lady plucked from the Marchlands, so Rumplestiltskin–known not just for his deal-making and dark magic, but also for his razor-sharp mind–very stupidly opens and shuts his mouth several times before finally stepping forward onto the warm island of the rug, crouching down slowly, and gingerly settling himself beside her. His long, taloned fingers worry the satin flounce on his sleeve, and the pointed toe of his leather boot nearly knocks over her half-full mug of cider, and he looks absolutely everywhere but at the charming dimple that materializes and then nestles deeper and deeper still into his maid's flushed right cheek.

"All right, I'll just…" Belle begins, and she rises to stand.

Mortified, he also scrambles to his feet, sputtering apologies because certainly he misunderstood her. Certainly this girl was not offering to sit close beside him and place her hands upon his peculiar gray-gold skin and ease this ache that never seems to leave him.

Certainly not.

"No–no, Rumple, please stay," she says, reaching out to take his fluttering hands securely in hers before he can turn tail and flee to his spinning wheel or his tower, "I only meant that I'll sit on the little sofa behind you. It will be easier to reach you that way."

Because her warm palms are still cradling his knuckles and because her lovely voice travels all the way down along his rigid spine and settles in his churning belly in the most delicious way, Rumplestiltskin doesn't comprehend much beyond 'please stay.' However, he is quite docile when she pulls him gently toward the settee, and he is unresisting when she settles him upon the floor with his back against the sofa. The furniture behind him dips and creaks, and then he feels her right leg pressed lightly against the side of his left shoulder, and he sees Belle's darling bare toes burrowing into the rug beside his thigh.

"Are you comfortable?" she asks him.

He can feel the warmth from her hand, hovering behind his neck.

"I, ah–yes," he breathes, not trusting his voice any further than this.

"All right then."

The back of his tangled hair is parted, oh-so-carefully, and then Belle's soft palm comes to rest upon the glistering, gray skin of his nape, warm forefinger and thumb on either side of the base of his skull.

Rumplestiltskin shivers.

"So now that I've recaptured you, let me tell you the absolutely fascinating thing about Erebus the Second," she says, leaning forward and moving her fingers in slow, firm circles against his stiff tendons and ligaments, "At first glance, his book appears to be a straightforward ethnography of this region–the local people, their customs, strange stories, interesting happenings. Folklore and magic, mostly. Nothing too odd for a magician to be interested in, I should think. But then, about a third of the way through, the book changes…"

Rumplestiltskin realizes that he has been holding in a breath, so he exhales slowly through his nose, closing his eyes.

Yes, yes, yes, he already knows how this story ends–tragically. What he doesn't know is how much longer he'll be able to bear the punch-drunk pleasure of Belle's fingers pressing and caressing his prickling scalp. He dearly wants to give way to impulse and allow his sceptre-straight neck to go limp, dropping the full weight of his shaggy head back into her hands. No one has touched him in ever so long.

"Erebus's stories rapidly become darker. Much darker. His descriptions of the people he encounters grow steadily less and less sympathetic. A poor swineherd becomes "a filthy pig." A girl selling flowers by the roadside is dismissed as "an illiterate trollop." He seems to take a perverse pleasure in documenting instances of betrayal, drunkenness, infidelity, theft, deadly feuds–even patricide. It's almost as if he began deliberately seeking out the ugliest aspects of humanity, looking for confirmation that, at heart, most people are base and cruel. But the strangest part of all is his handwriting…"

Rumplestiltskin closes his crooked teeth against a groan–both because Belle is rubbing his temples with such exquisite tenderness, and because he hates to dwell on this long-dead sorcerer's handwriting.

"In the beginning chapters, his penmanship was precise, elegant even. It had high, narrow loops and even spacing. But now that I'm more than midway through the book, his handwriting has become irregular, downward-slanting–almost deranged. I want to know what happened to him, but I'm honestly almost afraid to finish it and find out…"

"He was cursed," Rumplestiltskin mutters, "He later died from it."

Her fingers go stock-still against his temples. "So you've read it."

"Skimmed it. I gleaned enough to know how much the Dark Curse corrodes–and how quickly. You needn't bother finishing it, though. Your dear Erebus the magician-historian becomes quite profane towards the bitter end, and, ultimately, he stops making any sense at all. Quite a lot of froth and blather. Nothing fit for your young eyes."

His words are flippant, but with Belle's rose petal fingertips touching his skin, he cannot summon the correct levity of tone to match his message. She hears the discrepancy, of course, and drops both hands to his sloped shoulders, gently steadying him.

"Is that–is that what happened to you, Rumple? A dark curse?"

He has said too much already, but he finds he cannot bring himself to care while the warmth from her hands seeps into his brittle old bones.

"Yes, Erebus passed it along to Corentine (who, incidentally, was destined to become far more than an illiterate girl selling flowers by the roadside), and Corentine then passed it on to Malvolia, who swiftly and ruthlessly bestowed it upon Zoso, who, in turn, gifted it to me."

"Does it hurt?"

Rumplestiltskin coughs in surprise, because _no one,_ not even his own dear boy (not even in the very early years of his curse when he was still simply known as 'Papa') has ever thought to ask him what it feels like to share his frail and imperfect human body with an ancient evil.

"It hurts," he admits quietly.

"What does it feel like?"

He sighs, finally letting his head fall back against her knee.

"It feels like–my blood used to be spring water, but now it's turned to thick black tar. It's almost as if some poisonous plant has taken root within my entrails, and now the lethal vines are creeping up around my organs, touching and squeezing and nudging and whispering of all that I might accomplish if only I had a bit more magic."

Now it is Belle's turn to shiver, but she doesn't shrink away from him and his curse-stained skin and his blighted life and his bitterly sad story. Instead, she lays a hand upon his forehead, carefully smoothing back his snarled hair and saying, "You must have been so frightened."

And hearing her say it aloud forces him to remember exactly how frightened he was, all those many years ago.

Those first few nights in their cottage, newly cursed.

Bae's steady breathing from across the room.

The cramping and sickly squirming within his belly and the horrible, urgent whispering in his ears telling him to _smothertheboy_ because he's _suchaburden;_ your life will be _vastlybetter_ once you've _destroyedthistownwithfire_ but first _makethemkissyourboots._

Rumplestiltskin doesn't like to be reminded of his fears, so he tells her sharply, "It's you who should be frightened, Belle. It was the Curse that wanted you–drooled and begged for you–when you called for me to save your pitiful swamp land from the ogres. The Curse adores a pure, pink heart, and when it has finished burning mine to ashes, it will want to feast on yours."

He is breathing hard, but he doesn't move out of reach.

Her hand in his hair feels too lovely. Let her be the first to leave.

That is the natural order of things.

"I'm not afraid, Rumple," she says, her voice small but steady, "Your heart isn't ashes, your insides aren't poison, and you would never willingly let this magic hurt me. I think you've come to care for me." She gently cups his cheek, tilting his bewildered, ugly face back up to look at her, confessing, "And I've come to care for you as well. If I could carry this burden for you, I would."

He whispers, "You don't know the half of what you're saying."

She simply smiles, stroking his cheek. She is very foolish and very brave, and he simultaneously distrusts and admires foolish bravery.

The angry, intemperate part of him wants to go on arguing with her. He wants to tell her exactly what the Dark Curse is whispering to himeven now, at this very moment. How it goads him to twist his face towards her warm, firm thigh and _sinkhisteeth_ into the thin fabric of her blue skirt and roughly _tearitapart,_ and then–and then…

Instead, he submits to her hand upon his face, caressing his cheekbone. It feels sublime. No one has touched him in ever so long. His eyes shut, and his lips part, and if she keeps on touching him like this, she'll put him into a grateful trance. He can almost imagine that they aren't sitting in a drafty, ill-gotten castle littered with magical oddities. Perhaps, with his eyes shut, he and Belle can simply be an ordinary man and an extraordinary woman, and the firelight comes from their simple cottage hearth, and his sweet Bae is already in bed, his belly full from a family supper.

Just as Rumplestiltskin begins to fully relax and drift away into something resembling contentment, he hears a quiet gasp and feels Belle suddenly snatch her hand away from his face.

"Rumple, what's happening to your skin?"

He abruptly straightens up, heart thudding, and begins to twist around to ask her what she means, when Belle says, "Look."

She quickly stretches forward and presses her fingers to his bare collarbone. When she lifts her hand away, his skin is no longer a mossy gray-gold. It is a healthy, human pink.

"What did you do?" he asks, stupefied.

"I have no idea," she answers breathlessly, "How do you feel?"

"Better. I feel–better. Lighter, I think. Like I was buried beneath a heavy pile of rocks, and you somehow managed to lift a few of them off me. Still cursed, but–better."

She shifts her hand down to his hard-thumping heart and presses. When she next speaks, he can hear the smile rippling through her voice: "Rumple, I think you were wrong. Your curse doesn't want me. It's afraid of me. I think it's hiding! I think you bartered for me because, deep down, you knew that you needed me. You needed someone to stand guard against the darkness."

She withdraws her hand, and he can see her pure, pink handprint over his heart. And it really does feel better.

Mystified, Rumplestiltskin smiles a very small, very hesitant smile and leans slowly back against her. "Perhaps," he whispers, "Perhaps."


End file.
